1000 ★ CHAPTER 25 The Sixties
to assure blacks equality before the law, while blacks pushed for more govern-
ment action, sparking charges of “reverse discrimination.”
The Ghetto Uprisings
The first riots— really, battles between angry blacks and the predominantly
white police (widely seen by many ghetto residents as an occupying army)—
erupted in Harlem in 1964. Far larger was the Watts uprising of 1965, which
took place in the black ghetto of Los Angeles only days after Johnson signed the
Voting Rights Act. An estimated 50,000 persons took part in this “rebellion,”
attacking police and firemen, looting white- owned businesses, and burning
buildings. It required 15,000 police and National Guardsmen to restore order,
by which time thirty- five people lay dead, 900 were injured, and $30 million
worth of property had been destroyed.
By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some
feared racial civil war. Urban uprisings in that year left twenty- three dead in
Newark and forty- three in Detroit, where entire blocks went up in flames and
property damage ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The violence led
Johnson to appoint a commission headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner to
study the causes of urban rioting. Released in 1968, the Kerner Report blamed
the violence on “segregation and poverty” and offered a powerful indictment
of “white racism.” It depicted a country in danger of being torn apart by racial
antagonism: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one
white— separate and unequal.” But the report failed to offer any clear proposals
for change.
With black unemployment twice that of whites and the average black
family income little more than half the white norm, the movement looked
for ways to “make freedom real” for black Americans. In 1964, King called for
a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” to mobilize the nation’s resources to
abolish economic deprivation. His proposal was directed against poverty in
general, but King also insisted that after “doing something special against the
Negro for hundreds of years,” the United States had an obligation to “do some-
thing special for him now”—an early call for what would come to be known as
“affirmative action.” A. Philip Randolph and civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin
proposed a Freedom Budget, which envisioned spending $100 billion over ten
years on a federal program of job creation and urban redevelopment.
In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom movement, with demands
quite different from its predecessors in the South— an end to discrimination
by employers and unions, equal access to mortgages, the integration of public
housing, and the construction of low- income housing scattered throughout the
region. Confronting the entrenched power of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political